


Weaponized Niceness

by Seiberwing



Category: Crisis on Earth X - Fandom, DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: (No On-Screen Nazis), Crisis on earth x, Donuts, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mirror Universe, Nazis, Referenced bigotry, doppelgangers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 02:05:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13044240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiberwing/pseuds/Seiberwing
Summary: The secret origin of why Leo Snart is so damn nice and why Mickey Rory isn't around to join him in being nice.Or, Leo is slowly improving his attempts at Feelings Talk but Mick wishes he'd stop practicing.





	Weaponized Niceness

“No, I don’t want to talk,” said Mick, before ‘Call-Me-Leo’ had time to fully enter the Waverider’s dining room.

“I feel like we got off on the wrong foot before, Mick.”

“All your feet are wrong. Get out of my face.” Feelings talk. Leonard Snart and feelings talk. He could spit.

“That’s a shame. I’ll have to eat all of these myself, then.”

Leo set down the pink (pink!) cardboard box he was carrying and opened it, peering inside with a casual gaze.Mick looked up from his sulking and found himself trying not to drool.

Light glinted off the glaze of a half-dozen artisanal donuts nestled together, one dripping with caramel and another adorned with tiny chocolate chips that stuck out like the sharp spikes of a hedgehog. Leo delicately picked one up and examined it.

“Bacon and maple syrup. What will they think of next?” He had it halfway to his mouth before Mick tackled him.

“Give me that!” He snatched the donut from Leo’s fingers and shoved him away from the box of delights, stuffing into his mouth.

Leo perched on the edge of the table, folding his arms. At least he’d left the parka behind, though the cold gun was still dangling at his hip. “It’s nice to know some things stay the same between worlds. In my world Mickey had the same chronic sweet tooth.”

“Don’t compare me to some freak who goes down like a chump trying to save cops.”

“I know you’re only saying that because you think it will hurt me and make me leave.”

“Is it working?” asked Mick, bits of fried dough flying from his overstuffed mouth.

Leo let out one of those long breaths that he claimed let the stress flow out in a healthy way. Trying to offend this guy was like trying to offend a lump of jello. For a man who built his reputation on being able to offend delicate sensitivities, it was infuriating.

“I lied about how my Mickey died, before. Well, left out a few details.”

“What, were there some orphans and puppies in there too? …oh hell, there were, weren’t there.” Mick made a disgusted face but didn’t stop stuffing the face with donuts.

“Well, Tara’s guide dog wasn’t technically a puppy anymore—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“And they weren’t police officers like you have here, supported by the government with personalized jackboots. Our police officers kept the peace between people in the Rebellion, resolved conflicts and consequences. A lot more dialogue facilitation, a lot less handcuffs.”

“Goodie. Cops but nicer.” Mick went for the next donut. Pistachio. He didn’t even like pistachio but anything would be a welcome distraction from Leo.

“The point isn’t who he pulled out of the fire. It’s why he went in again after everyone was out.   
I was trying to play it up, flatter you, so I told you what I told everyone else. Hadn’t had the chance to talk with your friends about what really got your attention.”

“Yeah. Boobs, beer, and bonfires. Not rescuing pigs.”

“I like the alliteration.” Something about the way Leo emphasized words set Mick’s teeth on edge. Snart did the same thing but he did it for different words, different sentences. If the real Snart was here Leo would be an iceblock in minutes. No, seconds.

“Look, I’m not your therapist. You want to work through your fee-fees, go talk to Haircut. Or your friend with the sunshine coming out of his ass.”

Leo laughed.

“I’ll have to tell Ray that one. It’s cute, I like it.” The grin dropped to that sad, sympathetic smile that seemed to be trying to reach inside your chest and give your aching heart a hug. “To my point, Mick was a good man but he wasn’t a happy man. He’d seen terrible things, and some of them were things he’d done himself.”

“Good.” Okay, pistachio out of the way. He could move on to the caramel cream donut now.

“We could have been free and clear. He should have gotten out as soon as the last guy was clear, the fire would have taken out most of the Nazi battalion we were fighting. Nobody would have had to die. He could have, and he knew it. He didn’t.”

Mick fully expected a lip-quiver, maybe eyes on the floor or biting the lip in a mournful fashion. The other goody-two-shoeses he knew would have done it. Instead, Leo kept talking like they were on about the weather.

“Mickey went back into that fire to kill Nazis because he knew they’d kill him right back. Nazi assisted suicide. I told everyone it was an accident, made him out to be a hero…he was a hero, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t hurting. He kept it all bottled up, and when he couldn’t keep it bottled he tried to drown it in cheap beer.”

Mick falsified a dramatically loud burp of derision, and took pleasure in seeing Leo tense one fist.

“Why does it bother you that some version of you was a good person?” he said, through a gritted jaw he was trying to unclench.

“Because I don’t like nice people.”

“I said good, not nice.”

“If he’s anything like you, he was nice. Look at you.” Mick waved a sticky hand at the doppelganger. “You’re an embarrassment. You’re everything Len couldn’t stand to be. The guy I know, he was a criminal, an outsider. Never met a rule he wanted to follow and definitely never gave a shit about other people’s feelings.”

Again came the long, soothing exhale, which Mick interrupted with another loud burp. If this continued he might have to escalate to groin-scratching.

“When you live in heaven, you rebel by acting like a devil,” Leo said, lingering over every word with care. “When you live in hell, the best way to fight back is by acting like an angel. Do you know how hard it is to be a nice person where I come from?”

Mick snorted. “Yeah, tell me about how hard it is to be a wuss.”

Leo stood and paced the floor of the dining room. His gentle voice rose gradually in volume as he smoke, elegant thief-like fingers gesturing in the air. “Where I come from, the people we’re fighting think cruelty is a strength. You’re supposed to act with your gut instead of think, your masculinity determines your value, you can sleep with women as long as they don’t enjoy it too much, but god forbid you touch a man except to hurt him. You’re defined by who you hate instead of who you care about. The people I fight with? They’re—”

And Leo rattled off a series of slurs that made even Mick blink, crossing the board from the n-word to the f-word to a few that Mick hadn’t even heard of but was sure at least one person on the Waverider would punch him for using in normal conversation. Mick’s eyes grew wide as the list just kept going, each word spat out with the same emphasis as a bullet from a machine gun.

At the end of it Leo scooped up a fingertip of Boston crème and slipped it between his lips, then swirled it about with a disgusted expression before spitting into a napkin. “Need to wash my mouth out after all that. I don’t usually use that language, even to make a point. But those are my people. And I care about them, and I’d die for them, and Mick would have too, and those Nazi bastards can’t stand the idea of that. Being a nice guy is more foreign to them than the idea of being a thug.”

“Are you calling me a Nazi?” Mick grunted with a scowl.

Leo held up both hands. “No! God, no. I’ve seen your team. Just the company you keep would disgust them. Also you dress like you’ve never heard of Hugo Boss.”

“I haven’t.” He hadn’t.

“What I’m saying is that kindness is an act of rebellion in my world. My sister loving a person with the last name Ramon and me with one who has the first name Ray, that’s rebellion. Mick saving the lives of terrified people he’d never met before, that’s as much rebellion as you robbing a bank. What you see as a weakness is my strength, as much as your willingness to go against social norms is yours.”

He sat under Mick’s silent glare while the man continued chewing through caramel filling. Mick scrutinized every inch of him, picking apart where he differentiated from Len in the calluses on his fingers and marks on his coat, forcing his brain to see the man as a total stranger instead of something inside his friend’s skin.

“The puppet thing was still stupid,” he said, for lack of anything stronger to say.

“I know. I’m sorry. Gideon’s been bringing me up to speed with more effective counseling techniques. The puppet is the one I usually use for working with children.”

Mick considered the final donut, with a pose reminiscent of Hamlet considering Horatio’s skull.

“What the hell does it take to make you mad?” he asked. “Like really lose your shit. Everybody’s got a breaking point. Don’t tell me you don’t have one.”

“Oh, I have one.” Leo sucked the sticky remains of the Boston crème from his thumb. He rested his hand on his cold gun, gave it a gentle caress on the handle.

“I hit it a long time ago. And then I kept right on going.”


End file.
